


With Eyes

by Taverley



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: F/F, because i have weird science dreams about science babes and i am so fucking involved in this okay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-16
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-15 07:37:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8047954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taverley/pseuds/Taverley
Summary: You're more than the sum of your parts or the mass of your mind. Slowburn Gilbert/Holtzmann.





	1. Chapter 1

The first time she sees Erin Gilbert is at the corner of Amsterdam and West 123rd.

Abby’s dragged them out – far, _far_ out _–_ for _Japanese_ , of all things. Holtzmann is balancing a stack of steaming Tupperware and sake cups on her forearm when Abby grabs it and yanks her back into the restaurant.

“Oh, _shit_. Holtz, get _down_.”

Down? She slaps a hand on top of the stack and drops like she’s on fire. (just like they’d practiced.) “Great, but why am I up close and personal with the gyoza graveyard?” Holtzmann eyes off a musty old masterpiece under the counter.

Abby still has her hand on Holtzmann’s shoulder. She’s peering through the venetian blinds, and there’s something on her face that Holtz has seen only once before, when TuPac carked it.

Her eyes narrow behind her glasses. Pan a little further; widen again. “Think we’re good.”

Holtzmann claws her way vertical and peers out the window. “What’m I looking at?”

“Her.” Abby guides Holtz’s attention with her finger before she sinks, rock-bottom and skimming along the sea floor.

It’s a woman. Tall, wiry, clad in grey, skittering across the intersection like she’s afraid the cars don’t see her. Holtzmann’s initial instinct is _professor_ , but _Holtz_ is a professor, and _Abby_ is a professor, so academic authority is all a little equivocal to her.

Her second instinct is to do what she does any time she sees an attractive and unattainable woman. “Damn!” She all but barks it. “Not your usual, Abs, but good on you for branching out. You freak.” She nudges Abby good-naturedly with her shoulder.

Abby smiles thinly, but she’s so grim that she may as well have been reading your eulogy. Holtzmann immediately deflates: in her single short year of sharing lab space with Doctor Abigail Yates, she’s never known such a divergence from her diligence.

“Hey.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t, what?”

They watch that woman together for some time. They see her to the sidewalk, down the street, and around the corner on to Amsterdam. She drags her aura with her, and as the end of her tall kitten heel disappears, Abby exh _aaaa_ les. “Come on. We gotta go.”

“Go where?”

“Back to work, idiot. I need to show you something.”

It’s not her boobs, despite Holtzmann’s incessant teasing on their commute. It’s just a book. “It’s just a book,” Holtzmann says, overturning the gargantuan volume over in her hand. Abby is pacing nervously; her food is growing cold on the workbench, and Holtzmann can’t stomach the uncomfortable pit that Abby is driving into with each successive stroke. Holtz pries open the dust jacket. It _creaks_.

The noise distresses Abby further. She cringes in harmony, and grinds to a halt. “That’s not just any book. That is _Ghosts From Our Past, Both Lit_ –“

“ _Literally and Figuratively_. Yeah, I _can_ read. Didn’t know you could _write_ , though.”

“Hilarious. But neither could I, until I tried. Granted, it’s not as _refined_ as anything I’ve punched out since. Here…” Abby gestures for control, and Holtzmann splays the book in cradled hands. Abby flicks towards the back and steadies the spine with her finger.

Holtzmann can _almost_ keep her giggles in. “Nice hair, Wilson Phillips. Is the dream still alive?”

“No.” It’s far more of a curt response than Holtz was expecting, sure, but it does the trick. This isn’t an Abby-derision session, and she’s deflecting on purpose. Instead she focuses quietly on the other author’s portrait a moment. Its subtitle. _Erin Gilbert_. The name is _vaguely_ familiar.

If she squints, she can kind of see it: Holtzmann’s memory of the woman at the crosswalk is fuzzy – granted, she wasn’t looking at her face – but she understands the significance of the book she didn’t know existed, of Abby’s recession into melancholic Morrissey-mode, and of the mousy woman whose eyes implore her from the back cover of a book. “So… Stacy’s mom has it going on.”

“Well, I wouldn’t put it _quite_ that way, but it’s very likely,” Abby replies. “I’ve not seen her in _years_. Had no idea she was even in New York…” And from the look on her face, Holtz gathers that Abby’s about ready to high-tail it back to Michigan.

“Old friend?”

“ _Very_ old. Research partner, actually. We wrote this is in sophomore year, with the intention to self-publish. Erin was… _is_ brilliant. I’ve never known _anyone_ so talented – she’s _crazy_ smart. Like, an entire chess championship on steroids. That _bitch_.”

Abby fills her in on her history with Erin over lunch. And dinner. Start to finish, they have years upon years upon volumes upon summer blockbusters of histories, and it engages Holtz in a way that only the terrestrial and the practical ever has. Because, the way Abby tells it, Erin is _living history_ : and, as Holtzmann comes to realize, the woman’s absence from Abby’s life is not complete. She informs every aspect of how Abby is, _who_ she is, and _why_ she does. She’s the bridge between the Doctor Abigail Yates that Holtz met, to the Abby that Holtz knows today.

And she’s a little jealous. Because she’s never known the attachment that Abby still displays. She’s never felt the comradery that she relays. Has never known that a person could feel quite this way about another, and she’s _jealous_ because she thought she was finally _fitting_ into a place that she realizes now is already filled by a memory.

Holtz _hates_ Erin, too. Not because she can occupy space through some impossible Spooky Action, but because she _isn’t_ still present. The way Abby explains it – from Erin’s initial disengaged reality, through their rise to glory, and Erin’s ultimate betrayal – Erin’s is a cautionary tale in toeing the line between living and dead.

And that’s another thing: Holtz learns over the course of the afternoon of Abby’s particular area of specialization: _ghosts_. Abby teaches astrophysics. Her dissertation was on momentum exchange tethers and Holtz had found it engrossing. She works with Abby now because she’d emailed a comprehensive crisiticism of Abby’s dissertation in lieu of a résumé. For all the tendency they shared to drift up and out of this world, and for all they had _The X Files_ on a consistent and selective loop on their small monitor, Holtz hadn’t ever pegged Abby to be the sort of chick who was out of this _plane_.

But she’d been so far out with Erin that it’d been easy to pretend it didn’t exist.

It gets Holtz thinking.

Later that night, as they’re locking up the lab, Holtz is shoving ungraded quizzes into her rucksack. Out of nowhere she asks, “D’you miss her?”

“Gillian Anderson? God, yeah. Every day.”

“Screw you. Erin, I mean.”

Abby thinks. Holtz can tell she’s thinking of the present as opposed to the past, because Holtz is thinking about it too. She’s never met the woman, and she feels like a real and legitimate ghost. It’s now that Holtz realizes she’s dead to Abby.

“Nah. Nothing there to miss.”

Holtzmann dips her head as she shimmies into her coat. Something akin to a secondhand sting yanks her down and out of the clouds. She wonders briefly whether this Abby is every Abby who’s ever loved and lost; whether Holtzmann herself is just as disposable. God forbid she take another job.

But she takes the book.

Finishes it in a night.

Comes to work the next morning, unshowered and unrested and unrelented. “Abs. _Abby_. You’ve _gotta_ put this back into print.”

Abby’s peering at Holtzmann like she’s a zoo exhibit. “Did you sleep?”

“Not a wink. You _need_ to publish this bad boy. God _damn_ it, Abby, this is…”

Holtzmann hasn’t the words. She only has the _numbers_ and the _pictures_ and the beautiful, phenomenal _atomic bomb_ of a mind that is Erin Gilbert.

One particularly fantastic back issue of _Scientific American_ notwithstanding, Holtz has never finished a single book cover-to-cover, but _Ghosts From Our Past_ is somethin’ else. Every word, every syllable, every _beautiful bracket_ of quantum nonsense in that old first edition is a fucking _revelation_. Sure, she believes in ghosts – Holtz’ll believe in anything if you can back it up – and these two? They’ve got _stacks_ in the back.

More than that.

She’s heard the stories. She’ll hear plenty more, and not one of them will be nice. But Holtz has a grasp now on who Erin Gilbert was, who she is, and who she might be. She’s a mess of run-on sentences, repressed emotions, and the craziest math Holtz has ever seen. Every page of it brilliant. Every integer a masterpiece. Erin Gilbert has the mind of a madwoman, and Holtz is utterly and completely transfixed.

Erin’s a weirdo. But Abby was right. She’s a brilliant weirdo.

“Abby, do you still believe in this? Ghosts, and all that?”

She could withdraw, but she doesn’t. “We have the proof. We’ve got…” she gestures to the hardcover in Holtz’s eager hands.

Who claps them shut around the thing and tosses it aside, rummaging in her pockets with that blue heat she only feels when she’s elbows deep in circuitry and enamel paint. “Dude, I got her deets.” She’s talking about Erin – Doctor Erin, as Holtz now knows, who teaches at Columbia University, and who is the proud author of an impressive body of work.

Name. Number. A little heart above the ‘I’. Scrawled on a Post-it that she thrusts into Abby’s hands.

Abby stares for a moment. Looks at the lettering. She’s misty like a Monday morning for a beat, before she tears the Post-it in half. Holtz is crestfallen. “No. _No._ Absolutely not.”

“Why? This is some crazy shit, Abby – that math? _Jesus_! That _math_ is outta this world, and it’s _god damn art_.”

“Yeah, and it’s all Erin’s.” Despite Abby’s name on the equation. They had thought a hyphenation would be tasteful. “This is as much her work as it is mine, y’know. And I’m _not_ gonna go _crawling back_ …”

“Right, right…” Holtz ticks her gears for a second. Erin is integral – she’s the tether that’s keeping them in the mortal plane, but her mind’s so far out in the ether that Abby refuses to reel her in. “But I understand what she’s angling – most of it. So do you. _Consider_. We – even if you _don’t_ put it out there… maybe we resurrect your pet project. No pun intended.”

Abby removes her glasses. Tepidly she cleans them on her cardigan. Plays with their limbs. Pops them back on her face, and narrows her eyes behind the lenses. “You’re a nut.”

“And _proud_ , Doctor Yates, ‘cause I know _genius_ when I see it. We could change the _world_ with this, and you don’t even have to talk _to_ or _about_ your good girl Gilbert.”

“How did you even...?”

“LinkedIn. She’s a real catch, actually. Teacher.”

Abby puts her hand up and falls into its shadow. “I don’t care. I don’t wanna know. If you’re legitimate, Holtzmann – we’ll… we’ll need parts…”

“Gotcha covered.”

“Lab space.”

Holtzmann takes a half-assembled computer monitor and unceremoniously throws it in the trash. She sees Abby _cringe_.

“… Funding…”

With a shrug, Holtz reaches for her lab coat and ties it around her waist. “What’s that dumb Dean dude ever done for us? We’re swimmin’ in unused funding. I say we change the direction of our curriculum.”

This is Abby’s stagger. She thumbs through a stack of papers, some of which she’s already inked in red. “It’s almost finals…”

“Yeah, and it’s almost drop-out season, too. Screw ‘em.”

“Screw you.”

“If you insist.”

And there’s something new in Abby again. Muted, but there. It mirrors the intensity in the hurt she displays when she talks about Erin, but there’s an animation that overpowers the creak of her joints and the greyness with which she navigates their working relationship.

Which evolves. Suddenly. And without need for context. The both of them get so stuck in that it’s only a day before Holtzmann has their first PKE meter up and running, and that they’re planning an overnight stakeout at New York’s most haunted houses, and Holtz could swear that Abby’s forgotten all about Erin again.

Except she hasn’t. Because she talks about her constantly. Freely and easily she defames the name, and they laugh about it and knock her down and Holtz is okay with that. In confidence, she works her way through Erin’s later work, and she learns about Erin’s life through that.

How smart she is. How far she’s come.

And one afternoon, she takes off early. Combs her hair, dresses down, and sits in the back row of Erin’s last Advanced Quantum Mechanics lecture of the season.

When Erin finishes, and the lecture hall clears, Holtz clears the fog from her glasses and emerges from her reverie. She traipses through the cramped rows of seats to where Erin is clearing up, and _goodness fucking gracious_ , if she doesn’t look like a dowdy dream up close.

“Excuse me? Doctor Gilbert?”

Her head snaps up. She smiles. It’s meek. It’s there. “I’m sorry, hi.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Oh, thank _god_.” Erin’s airs visibly deflate before a shadow crosses her eyes. “Oh – I didn’t mean – no, it’s just, you’re not in my class.”

“Nope.” Holtzmann unearths a printed and bound copy of Erin’s work on _Fermion masses, mixes and proton decay._ Clicks her pen. Offers both. “But I really… I love your work. A lot. Hope you don’t mind me sneaking in."

Erin is taken aback, she sees, and there’s a hindrance in her acquisition of the pen. “Thank you.” It’s a breath. It’s fresh. It’s honest. Holtz wonders if anyone’s ever properly credited this woman besides Abby. “You want me to..?”

“Please.”

With a steady hand, Erin signs the title page beneath her sans-serif name. “Who do I make it out to?”

“Um. Jill.”

She does. “Thanks, Jill. You made my day.”

And Holtzmann smiles, and Erin smiles, and it’s the smiliest damn smile party she’s ever been to. “Nah, don’t mention it.” Really, don’t. “You made mine first, so.”

The next morning at work, Holtz begins construction on the proton wand, and wonders whether the decided lack of length to hers and Abby’s arms is a sufficient hint to bring someone else aboard.


	2. Chapter 2

The first time Erin Gilbert sees _herself_ is on a teeny-tiny screen.

She’s hunched over her bathroom sink with a dish scourer and a bottle of industrial bleach. She’s mixed it with soap that doesn’t stop the sting, cream that doesn’t soothe the burns, and tears that don’t make her feel any better either way. Her skin is red-raw, her hair’s clumped like straw, and her ruined clothes are discarded and crumpled on the floor.

Erin’s phone had pinged not long after she’d got home with a link and the message, ‘ _You need proof?_ ’ Slime-laden and seething from the inside out, Erin had stripped down and propped up her phone by the mirror.

As she picks and bleeds, she watches.

Subway attack. Dim. Fuzzy. Screaming. Menace. It’s a few minutes of fresh hell, and Erin’s feeling less than fresh.

She racks up hundreds of views over several hours of quarantine: six or seven for every time she has to drain the sink to prevent it clogging up with spectral gunk.

There’s a ghost, alright, and Erin’s wearing the proof all over her.

Each subsequent viewing is new information; a new focus. At first Erin is focusing on death, and how close she had come to it: she has scrapes and knocks and other grim kisses that draw her lines and connect her dots. Rust rub that demands a tetanus shot; chemical burns where her slime suit wouldn’t chip off.

(Erin wears long sleeves for weeks after.)

But as close as they came, the further they got: _Gilbert, you snagged a ghost_. They couldn’t disperse the manifestation, but _Erin_ had caught it in a proton beam long enough to look it in its dead eyes and _know_ she was seeing something that wasn’t a lie.

And that’s her second revelation. _Ghosts are really real_.

Their trajectory may have been off, and Erin still feels in the thrum of her fingertips that she’s got a lot of residual noise to extricate from future iterations of their equipment. The scale and outright scariness of Holtzmann’s first prototype – some of which Erin still has in her briefcase, she realizes – is impractical, particularly for the power output.

It makes things so much more terrestrial for Erin. It’s grounding, like the iron collar that’s in pieces on her coffee table. Erin was right. Erin is right.

Erin is _right_.

And that’s what’s most important, but it nearly escapes her notice: Erin sees herself in the video, and it’s a far cry from what she sees in the mirror right now. Hell, it’s not even the Erin whose frantic and filthy face first appeared on Reddit only a few days prior. The Erin she sees in the subway is the Erin she always hoped she could be.

Even if she’s all fire and brimstone, and even if she rattles and rumbles like her cables are shorting somewhere down the line, Erin sees the iteration of herself that _means_ something. And her mind, wide and wild, conceives only syllables of what it means to be that woman.

Syllables are all that Erin is capable of when she gingerly works her arms into a sweatshirt, and the soft, warm fleece grates on her tender skin. She ghosts through to her living room and sits before the pieces of Holtzmann’s contraption that Erin kept for her perusal.

It’s miraculous.

She’s followed Erin’s law to the letter. Right down to the tentative scaffolds of machinery she’s _sure_ she destroyed with the only printed copies of her book, Erin is holding _sheer proof_ in her hands. She sifts through it and engages with the circuitry; although it’s shorted at the surge (which Erin wears boldly on her neck), she follows the nuts, bolts and breadcrumbs back to her first conceivable design.

There are bits she doesn’t quite remember. Erin reaches into her briefcase and unearths the rough blueprints she’d lifted from Holtz’s makeshift lab.

“How _dare_ you.”

Holtz has recalibrated.

Erin’s overcome with a decades-old vitriol that tastes as bad as her bleach-burned skin smells. This is her _life_ , her _legacy_ – _years_ of chasing false leads and connecting dead ends, _decades_ of burying and _tonnes_ of weight off her shoulder when she’d been dug out and hauled up – _you don’t even believe in this stuff anymore_.

Lie. Total lie, _and you know it, Erin_. Because there’s that part of her telling her to _break_ : break what? Holtzmann? Herself? God knows, Erin’s pride broke long ago, when she’d broken away and forfeited any right she had to an identity.

All Erin can discern is something of hers is quite in pieces, and all it takes is a gavel to the grain.

Which she finds in the intricacies of Holtzmann’s blueprint. Her working is sparse and whole chunks are missing, but Erin finds a spacey oversight in the separation of her dual paths. It’s… ballsy. Diffracting a beam. Erin sees immediately that Holtzmann is trying to direct photons in two different directions simultaneously, and, “God, woman, no _wonder_ you nearly killed us…”

But it’s so _god damn ballistic_ that it lights Erin up, and she’s filling in the blanks that Holtzmann’s left her like she’s not taken a moment’s pause from the subject. Erin works back; she works throughout the evening without so much a pause as to brew herself a pot of coffee. She buys a copy of her own e-book and rediscovers the mayflower romance that marked her monumental love affair with numbers.

And Erin meets Holtzmann properly for the first time. Not by virtue of an encounter, but at the unmarked intersection of the mind behind the metal. She’s a little scary: Holtzmann communicates in dots and dashes, leaves leaps between her conclusions, and apparently hides her variables. Holtzmann’s machines are in a complex shorthand that it takes all night for Erin to decipher, and then until the sun comes up to rectify.

The more Erin learns, the more she realizes that she is redundant. That the scale and scope of her mind is incomparable to Holtz’s crazy, and she needs to _break_ and _break now_ before someone else has to opportunity to break her.

She _hates_ Holtzmann. She hates Holtz’s head and everything that goes on inside it. She hates the idyllic little summer camp friendship Holtz’s got going on with Abby. She _especially_ hates that she took a skin-and-bones equation that is now over a decade old and breathed pure, true _life_ into it. Erin breaks down. And then she breaks _through_.

Erin solves the particle interference problem and achieves perfect duality. And then she goes to work, showered but unrested, and lays the blueprints down beneath all six pages of her working for Holtz to encounter when she comes in a half hour later.

“What’s this?” Holtzmann peers at Erin through the thick rims of her glasses, and Erin can see the deep shadows that live behind them.

“I fixed it.”

“In a night?”

Erin shrugs down a mouthful of lukewarm coffee.

“I was gonna do it today.” There’s something in Holtzmann’s tone that Erin cannot quite discern. It’s certainly not mean; there’s not an ill thread to pull from her. But it _stings_ , and Erin’s skin crawls beneath her clothes.

“And I saved you the trouble. _Holtz_.” There is nothing misleading about Erin. Not now; not ever again. “You were _trying_ to diverge a beam through a double-slit —”

Holtzmann sniggers.

“Mature. Really. Regardless, your interference pattern was _crazy_ , so I just _went_ through and tried to help. That’s all.”

Despite their degrees of separation, Holtz thumbs through Erin’s notes in eerie silence. The rustling of paper keeps Erin raptly attentive: she’s watching shades drift across Holtzmann’s expression. Darkening, lightening, becoming something Erin is all parts sure Holtzmann is not.

“You figured out the complimentarity.”

Erin is radiant. She tries – in vain – to dampen herself. “I did.”

“That’s some crazy math, Doctor Gilbert.”

“Erin’s fine.”

“Is she?”

No, as it happens. She’s not. She’s holding a rope that unravels with every tug, and it burns her hands from the friction. Erin disappears behind her desk, erecting her laptop screen like a wall, and straightening her papers a little more forcefully than she needs to. “Sorry. I didn’t realize I was encroaching.”

“You’re not —”

“—Take them. Don’t. Either way. They’re there, they’re yours.”

Holtzmann rocks back in her chair, palms splayed together as her chin rests on her index fingers. Erin casts her the last of her nets before she drops in to her work. She thinks she should text her boyfriend, maybe; they have outstanding lunch plans. Outstanding lunch plans that Erin has blown off three days in a row.

She collects her phone. The first thing she sees is the message she got last night, and Erin realizes now that it was from an unfamiliar number. She hastens a reply.

‘ _How did you get this number_?’

Barely a minute passes of Erin staring at her phone before they reply, ‘ _Maybe don’t put your CV on LinkedIn if you don’t want people hotline blinging you._ ’

In spite of this, Erin elects to leave her résumé online. She goes to have lunch with her boyfriend – gets as far as his office. Turns around, and brings a box of doughnuts back to the firehouse.

By the time Erin arrives, Abby is poring over Holtzmann’s shoulder as she connects the circuitry on something Erin vaguely recognizes from her amendments. Their eyes meet wordlessly over the box of doughnuts; Abby takes several with gratitude. Holtzmann fondles her blowtorch, as if she’s waiting for the go-ahead.

Erin sets the box down on the corner of the workbench and leaves her be.

Moments later, her phone pings in her pocket. ‘ _Mucho appreciato_ , _’_ from the unknown number. Erin’s eyes lift just in time to see Dr Holtzmann, with a doughnut between her teeth and a dusting of powdered sugar on her chin, slip her phone into her overalls.

Erin commits the number to her phonebook, and wonders what her boyfriend is doing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My aesthetic is intellectually-intimidated Erin Gilbert.  
> Find me on tumblr @rinicorn. prompt 'n' stuff.


End file.
